By Emma Margraf,
Director of Special Projects
For the past year, the blog for the Volunteer Center has
been about the adventures of our Executive Director, Sara Ballard, as she
volunteered her time in the community and got to know more and more about the
amazing things that happen here. It’s been a great path for her to travel, but
we’ve decided to change it up a little and incorporate all of the different
aspects of our work – particularly the things that keep us excited, interested,
passionate, and involved in what we do.
Ever since Adam Fletcher, the Director of Common Action
(www.commonaction.com) moved into our office, I’ve been having a lot of fun. I
find myself in the hallway bouncing big plastic balls back and forth and
debating how to make the most impact, how to build the most capacity, and how
shake things up. The bouncing ball aspect is important, but I can’t tell you
why. It’s how we get to our biggest, brightest, and most impactful ideas. To
give you an idea of what I mean, I’m going to transcribe an interview of sorts
with him here, and you can draw your own conclusions. Are you ready? Here we
go:
Emma: I have a
question I think only you can answer, Adam. Are you ready for this? I’m a
little concerned that for the most part when people volunteer in their
community, they aren’t really accomplishing as much as they could. Do you know
what I mean?
I’m not saying it’s their fault, or
anyone’s fault at all, just that the precedent has been set for volunteering to
be very temporary, where we’d like it to be sustainable. If you were all
powerful in the universe, where would you start with that problem?
Adam: Emma, I'm
always ready for a nerdy conversation about volunteerism!
To answer your question, I would
begin by having everyone look at why they volunteer. See, in order for
volunteering to be really effective, people have to be genuinely empathetic
with those they want to serve. You can't be empathetic if you don't know why
you're doing what you're doing. So the first place I'd start with the problem
you stated is looking at why.
But more importantly Emma, I might
suggest that you aren't addressing the right problem.
Emma: Huh. Way to
throw out the gauntlet with the open question that has me thinking and
thinking. What's the right problem? (HA. RIGHT problem.) Is it volunteerism
addressing actual empathy? I feel like we should recognize that there is a
range of emotion within the understanding of empathy. Some define it as the
understanding of others’ feelings, some as the ability to walk in other
people's shoes.
I for one was raised within the
"there but for the grace of god go I" school of empathy, but that's
not what everyone believes. We were taught that it would take a simple twist of
fate to turn our luck and leave us in serious poverty, or poor health, and
without that which we needed to survive. And so it was our responsibility to
look out for others. We are our brothers keepers, we are our sisters keepers --
E Pluribus Unum: Out of Many, One.
And because it was how I was
raised, that makes it right. Isn't that the way it works?
Adam: The problem
is that you are assuming that anything, anybody, anywhere needsyour help.
That's easy to do, and volunteers do it all the time. Kids in schools need tutoring.
People without homes need that house built. Roadways need to be cleaned. People
who can't read need to be taught how to read.
Now don't get me wrong: I believe
literacy and housing and environmental health are important. However, I don't
think that going blindly into the night assuming that any of those problems
needs us to fix them is the right way. The right way has something to do with
helping volunteers see that they benefit from giving as much if not more than
the recipients of their volunteerism. This truism has been known for a long
time in the fundraising field – teach givers that their philanthropy benefits
both them and the recipient and they're more likely to give more money in a
more sustained way. That should be the rule with volunteers, too, in every
situation, all of the time.
Emma: I have
given that fundraising training. During that training you ask the group to tell
you who benefits more from a donation to a non-profit, the donor or the
non-profit? Those new to fundraising say the non-profit, those who are
experienced say the donor, always. What I wonder about, when applying it to
volunteers, is how heavy and complicated race and class and sexual orientation
and gender and personal history issues will get when you are asking someone to
check your motivations.
Adam: You’ve hit
the nail on the head Emma, and identified exactly why we are not already asking
these questions whenever a volunteer walks through the door: we’re scared of
what we might hear. We might find out that someone hurts, or that somebody
feels righteously indignant, or that someone somewhere somehow thinks they did
something wrong. Often that someone is us, ourselves. Pair that with the
intonation that volunteerism heals the soul, and suddenly volunteerism becomes
self-help, and self-help saves the day. And that’s the problem.
Emma: You remind
me of something that happened to me years and years ago. Right after the Rodney
King verdict, I was walking through one of the toughest part of Oakland with a
long-time friend. He’s African-American, I’m white (as far as I can tell), and
he was angry. His response to the verdict was that the black community should
rise up, take California, and kick everyone out. In particular, NO WHITE PEOPLE
ALLOWED. My immediate response was to say, “except me, right?” He said no. I
might get a visitor’s pass, but he’d have to consult with his people.
I was really offended. The truth
about that situation was that he loved me, we had a long time friendship, I
grew up in Oakland. But I wasn’t allowed in.
Adam: It was
probably that love that allowed him to speak honestly to you. Speaking from my
personal experience growing up I can attest to the feeling that used to well
inside me whenever somebody foisted assistance onto me and my family. That
feeling, which is hard to name, is one part humility and one part inability,
mostly because it felt like whenever somebody forced charity onto my family we
were obligated to take it. In turn, I felt forced to believe that because we
had to take charity we were somehow lesser than those who had given it.
In this same way, well-meaning
volunteers often force themselves onto the organizations, communities, and
individuals who they choose to serve. I understand your story about your friend
to mean that he didn’t want any white person, you included, to force themselves
into the fictional country of people of color he conjured up; rather, he wanted
people of color to have the right to let in white people as they chose to,
rather than as they forced themselves in.
Emma: I’m
certainly not offended anymore. I love the people that can speak that way to
me, and I love being able to do the same. Every day volunteers ask me why they
sometimes their phone calls to a particular group with an offer to help aren’t
returned. Sometimes the answer is, we can’t use your help right now. Sometime
the reason for that is because people you’d like to help are trying to sort out
what they need and how they need to get it. They deserve that time.
Adam: This is the
way that our socio-economic system works. We teach volunteers they have
something to give and we expect them to give it. The underlying lesson that
people who receive this volunteerism learn is that they must accept and
appreciate whatever they are given. In this way our society forces every poor,
low-income, working class, and middle class person into indentured existences
by training them to aspire to lifestyles they simply cannot attain, for
whatever reason: credit, education, opportunity... Whatever “it” is, something
keeps them from having “it.”
It is through this logic that we
actively enshrine volunteerism’s role in our society today. Volunteerism is becoming
a defacto way to achieve enlightenment and self-satisfaction for those who
volunteer. At the same time the recipient of that volunteerism is bound to the
social position they occupy, primarily because the unspoken language of
volutneers is that, “I am better than you because I do something for you from
the goodness of my heart.” This disables the recipient and reinforces that
socio-economic hierarchy which repressed them to the place of needing charity
in the first place. It’s a wicked cycle.
Emma: It’s funny
that we’ve gotten to this, because the other day I facilitated a conversation
between volunteer managers where they were concerned about keeping every single
volunteer. They were worried that they were losing volunteers after their
orientation trainings, and they were worried about how to keep short-term
volunteers involved who didn’t want to be there.
I tried to introduce the idea that
they didn’t need everyone who darkened their door. I suggested, fairly
directly, that they should be picky about who they let volunteer in their
organizations and that they should power through without the folks who didn’t
show up. They didn’t agree.
Later on, I brought this subject up
with the director of a local program who recruits volunteers for long-term,
high demand work with court-dependant children and she said, “oh no, I say
thanks for stopping by! And let them leave. People who drop out in the middle
of a training are people who, if I’d successfully talked them into staying,
would most likely be back in my office a few months later having a conversation
about how it’s not working out. Self-selection makes my job easier.”
I bring this up to say this: it’s a
partnership.
Adam: Yes, a
partnership – in a mechanistic, institutionalized sense. I want to aspire to
something higher though, and maybe that’s my Achille’s heel. I think that we
can ascend, as a society, to utter solidarity in our every action and reaction.
We have to reach higher than mediocre, and I would suggest that merely having
convenient partnerships throughout our society as mediocrity.
Solidarity, taught, nurtured, and
sustained in our every interaction, could allow every person to fulfill their
hopes and dreams, while simultaneously defeating our current condition of
apathy toward our fellow humans – because through solidarity those hopes and
dreams would be as Langston Hughes wrote about in his poem, “Freedom’s Plow”:
“Thus the dream becomes not one man’s
dream alone,
But a community dream.
Not my dream alone, but our dream.
Not my world alone,
But your world and my world,
Belonging to all the hands who
build.”
Emma: With that,
shall we leave this here and post it on the blog? Or are we solving all the
world’s problems today?